The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Fifty years ago today, the President of the United States grimly contemplated the possibility of global nuclear war as he entered a showdown with the Soviet Union over nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Fifty years later, his two potential successors debated horses, bayonets and whether the United States Navy is smaller than in 1916.

Watching last Monday's debate, which was supposed to be on foreign policy but where foreign policy was almost trivialized by Obama and Romney, it was clear how the world has changed. In October 1962, I was three months away from being born, but I did grow up during the second half of the Cold War. By then, the world had moved on from the duck-and-cover, Missile Gap days of the 1950s, when nuclear apocalypse seemed to go beyond possible into probable. Yet even in the 1970s and 1980s, the mushroom clouds hovered in the background, so much a part of the routine of life that one didn't think about it anymore than the weather. But it was there, emerging now and again in arms control talks, neutron bombs and movies like "The Day After". Whatever else a President might desperately want to focus on - the economy, unemployment, inflation - he always had to deal with the fact that his decisions could result in the end of civilization as we knew it.

The Cuban Missile Crisis has become a mythical moment in American history. Though recent scholarship has debunked many of those myths, the crisis is a goodie bag from which politicians and policy-makers grab whatever lesson they need at the moment. Romney's partisans would point to JFK's handling of the missile crisis as evidence that a muscular, steely U.S. policy toward Iran will deter Tehran from building a nuclear bomb. Obama's camp would to the crisis as an example of how calm Presidential leadership averted catastrophe.

Yet watching Obama and Romney bob and weave around foreign policy, eating their Arab Spring spinach so they could get to the dessert of boasting about their plans for tax cuts and education, I wondered what JFK would have judged the candidates? Would he have considered them shallow when it came to weighty matters of war and peace? I have a hunch, and no more than a hunch, for I don't believe in the necromancy of consulting the dead. My hunch is that JFK would have been pleased with Obama and Romney's foreign policy debate. Because it proves that the world has stepped back from the brink of nuclear war, enough that two Presidential candidates can treat foreign affairs as a sideshow. They have the luxury of doing this because their predecessors, such as JFK, managed to avoid blowing up the planet. There will still be foreign policy crises. Just as Kennedy had to deal with Vietnam and Berlin as well as Cuba,, so our next President will have prove himself on Iran, China and Venezuela. But he can do this knowing that the awful missiles sleeping in their silos are no longer targeted at Moscow or Los Angeles.

The Cuban Missile Crisis has immortalized John F. Kennedy, but after 13 days of bearing the fate of the world on his shoulders, it is an honor that JFK could have done without. I don't know how Obama and Romney would have handled the Cuban Missile Crisis. I do know that Al Qaeda and the Iranian Bomb are threats, but not half the threat of Soviet H-bombs 15 minutes away from vaporizing New York and Washington. We've come a long way, baby, and I am not nostalgic for fallout shelters and nuclear alerts.